1. Technical Field
The present teaching relates to methods, systems, and programming for entity recognition. Particularly, the present teaching is directed to methods, systems, and programming for entity recognition in a query.
2. Discussion of Technical Background
Online content search is a process of interactively searching for and retrieving requested information via a search application running on a local user device, such as a computer or a mobile device, from online databases. Online search is conducted through search engines, which are programs running at a remote server and searching documents for keywords in a search query and return a search result page including a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Some keywords in search queries—aliases that are associated with named entities—are of particular interest in search because they often reflect users' actual search intents behind their search queries and because those search results retrieved based on named entities are usually more relevant to the search query. Thus, great efforts have been made to named entity recognition (NER) in search queries.
Some known solutions rely solely on Wikipedia entities as the basis for identifying named entities in received queries and return only one entity for each query. Other known solutions try to solve which span in a query means what and then look at all possible interpretations of the query and rank them in their likelihood of occurrence in the query, which is inefficient in online search and is difficult to be scaled up to a larger entity base. Efforts have also been made to discover named entities that follow certain query patterns in offline query log mining systems. However, those offline systems are not integrated with runtime online search components. Moreover, most of the known solutions do not take user context and/or user feedback into consideration in their recognitions.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved solution for entity recognition in a query to solve the above-mentioned problems.